I was invited to speak at GE Global Research's Whitney Symposium '09
in Niskayuna, New York, a 600 acre research campus on the Mohawk river... the
legacy of one Thomas Edison.
It was a huge honor and an eye-opening experience (1,000 PhDs representing 22
disciplines in one building!).
The Theme for the Symposium was The Engineering of Customer Services.
Sound boring?
Not so, when you consider that 80% of the U.S. GDP is
not about Agriculture,
not about Manufacturing,
but about Services!

Like IBM before it, GE is pushing hard to become a services-driven company
versus just a product company,
and the Symposium brought together thought leaders on services sciences,
engineering and management, including
speakers form IBM's legendary Thomas Watson's Research Lab, MIT, Columbia
Univeristy, and think tanks from Europe.